Rich’s Video Blog: Autodesk, the Oscars & The Big Bang Theory

The second installment of my video blog covers a range of topics, including the rebranding of Autodesk; do you really want to live in Portland, Ore.; and guess who is a keynote speaker at the Design West show in San Jose, Calif., next month?

I have to admit I've never watched the show, Liz, but I did think the same thing as you: What could she say about design to 2,000 engineers? I have a feeling, though, that the keynote speech will have an overflow crowd wanting to see her.

Rich, I found your comments about rain funny. In the very wet California redwood forest where moss grows on plastic (this is not a joke) we run an industrial-strength dehumidifier in the winter. Average annual rainfall in my area is a bit higher than Portland, so if we went outside only when it's sunny, we'd turn into couch potatoes (or maybe trees). I guess it depends on what we're used to. When I went to Idaho for Thanksgiving many years ago, I was amazed that people were walking around outside in the snow and temperatures below freezing.

Hmmm...so what will an actress on a TV show have to say that's relevant to design, I wonder?? Hopefully she will be well-prepared! Funny thing about that show...one of my friends here, who is a German Web designer, also is a die-hard fan. So I suppose it translates across languages if you speak "computer geek." ;)

I remember when Silicon Graphics was the darling of CGI in movies. Now they're gone and Autodesk has become the darling. Maybe there's a parallel to the computing industry in general: Software today; hardware yesterday.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

Kaspersky Labs indicated at its February meeting that cyber attacks are far more sophisticated than previous thought. It turns out even air-gapping (disconnecting computers from the Internet to protect against cyber intrusion) isn’t a foolproof way to avoid getting hacked. And Kaspersky implied the NSA is the smartest attacker.

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